She wasn't calculating. She wasn't playing an angle. She was just good. I'd stopped believing that kind of goodness existed, because everyone in my life had an agenda and hers was apparently to feed me, make my grandmother laugh, and leave angry-face sticky notes on my door.
And I didn’t deserve her. She deserved better than a man who manufactured a crisis to avoid a company he didn’t want and used her restaurant as the stage.
She deserved someone who hadn’t destroyed her life by an impulsive move. Someone who could sit across from her at breakfast, eat the food she’d made, say thank you, and give her all the appreciation she deserved.
Someone who didn’t keep his distance because getting close was a risk he’d learned never to take.
She deserved someone who wasn’tme.
That thought should’ve stopped whatever was building in my chest. It didn’t. If anything, it made it worse, because the surest way to end something was to tell yourself you couldn’t have it, and I’d been telling myself that about Miley Torres for weeks now, but the wanting just kept getting louder.
No one had made me feel like this since Seraphina.
The name arrived uninvited and unwelcome, the way it always did when I let my guard down. Seraphina. The last woman who’d gotten past the wall. The woman I’d been ready to build something with, the only woman who’d ever made me consider that maybe theunwanted boycould becomea desired man.
And then I’d come home early from a shoot. Key in the lock. Door swinging open. The apartment smelled like her perfume and someone's presence that didn’t belong.
Dominic’s jacket was on the floor by the couch and his shoes were by the door and I knew. I knew before I reached the bedroom. I knew by the silence, the particular quality of silence that exists in a space where two people have stopped moving because they heard the front door open.
I stood in the bedroom doorway, looked at them, and felt every good thing I’d ever let myself believe collapse like a building with its foundations removed. One second I was a manin love. The next I was the boy at the end of the hall, learning again that love was a trap that other people set and he walked into.
The wall went back up that night. Higher than before. Reinforced. And it hadn’t come down since.
Until a woman with flour on her collar and the handprint she’d left on my face started leaving angry-face sticky notes on my door.
Shit.
The house was quiet when I got home that night. The kitchen was clean, a covered plate on the island with a sticky note that read:This one has extra garlic because I’m feeling spiteful.
I ate standing up. It was incredible, like everything else she made. I washed the plate, put it back, and peeled off the sticky note to add to the drawer with the others.
Miley’s door had light under it. I could hear music, something low and Spanish, and the faint sound of her voice singing along. She had a good voice. I’d heard her in the kitchen twice now, belting out songs while she cooked, and she was objectively, indisputably talented, and both times I’d stopped in the hallway to listen because the sound was the most alive thing in this house.
I walked to my room and changed. Then I stood in the shower with the water running hot and my hands braced against the tile.
The water ran over my shoulders, down my back, pooling at my feet. I stood there until it went lukewarm and then cold, but my body was still restless. Still wired.
I turned off the water, dried off, and pulled on a t-shirt and sweatpants. I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at it the way I always did. The mattress. The pillows. The sheets I changed every few days even though they didn’t need changing because I rarely slept in them.
I tried. I lay down, pulled the covers up, and closed my eyes.
Twenty minutes. That’s how long I lasted before the darkness behind my eyelids started to shift. The shapes came first—then the room at the end of the hall. The one my father assigned me. Away from the family bedrooms, because I wasn’t family, not really, not in the way that counted. Then the memory changed again. The shadows became the basement door. The lock turned from the outside. Light slipped out from under the gap. And then, silence.
I opened my eyes, heart hammering, hands gripping the sheets.
Not tonight. Please. Not tonight.
But the nightmare was already there, sitting on the edge of consciousness like something patient that had been waiting for me to try.
I got up, walked to the closet, and opened the door.
The closet was large. Walk-in. Expensive, like everything in this house. But I didn’t use the whole space. I used the corner. The far right corner, where the walls met at a ninety-degree angle and the space narrowed to something that felt enclosed, contained, and safe.
I pulled a blanket from the shelf and folded it on the floor. Then I closed the door, laid down on my side with my back against the wall, and my knees drawn up. The darkness wrapped around me like a familiar feeling.
This is the thing I’m most ashamed of.
A thirty-year-old man, wealthy, successful, decorated, lying on the floor of a closet because he can’t sleep in a bed when the nightmares come.
